Linspire Announces Availability of Open XML Translator for Linspire, Freespire

Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire commercial and
Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems, today
announced the immediate availability of the Open XML Translator
within their latest released Freespire and Linspire products.
Adding another interoperability tool to their core operating
systems, the Open XML Translator enables bi-directional
compatibility so that files saved in Open XML can be opened by
OpenOffice users, and files created by OpenOffice to be saved in
Open XML format.

Last month, Linspire announced it had joined ongoing efforts to
help create bi-directional open source translators for word
processing, spreadsheets and presentations between ODF and Open
XML.The result of these efforts are to improve the ability of
OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by
increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML formats.
As a result, end users of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org will
now be able to more easily share files, as documents will better
maintain consistent formats, formulas, and style templates across
the two office productivity suites.

“Interoperability within the PC ecosystem is extremely important
for Linux to find acceptance on the desktop,” said Kevin Carmony,
CEO of Linspire. “The ability to easily share document files
between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice users is vital to our users
and Linspire is pleased to now offer this enhanced capability.”

The Open XML format is an open standard file format for office
applications that can be freely implemented by multiple
applications on multiple platforms. The Open XML format was
standardized by Ecma International on December 7, 2006 and is also
being implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms.
It is now under consideration for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1.
Open XML is the default format for the recently released Microsoft
Office 2007. The Open XML format is also available through free
updates to past Microsoft Office versions.

“This is good news for our customers. Linspire and Microsoft are
enabling our customers to use technology that best meets the needs
of their business by providing tools that make it easier to
exchange documents between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice thanks
to XML,” said Jean Paoli, general manager for Interoperability and
XML Architecture at Microsoft. “As mixed system environments become
more common, our commitment to delivering interoperability by
design makes our ongoing collaboration with commercial open source
companies like Linspire so beneficial to our customers.”

With an estimated 100 million users, OpenOffice.org is a
full-featured, open source office productivity suite with word
processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.
OpenOffice.org currently supports the OpenDocument (ODF) file
format, which is an ISO-standardized, XML-based file format
specification for office applications maintained by the open source
community. The OpenDocument format ensures information saved in
spreadsheets, documents and presentations is freely accessible to
any OpenDocument-supporting application. OpenOffice.org is
available free of charge at http://www.openoffice.org. The open
source Open XML/ODF Translator project can be viewed at this
internet location:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter.